FOUR Catholic bishops have joined other heads of Churches as well as leaders of the Jewish and Muslim communities to warn federal, state and territory governments of the dangers of human cloning.
Archbishop George Pell of Sydney, Archbishop Denis Hart of Melbourne, Bishop Kevin Manning of Parramatta and Bishop Ted Collins of Darwin are among 80 signatories to an open letter warning of the ‘grave offence to human dignity’ of ‘producing human embryos by a cloning process or any other method of non-sexual reproduction’.
They also criticise the NSW Government’s decision to introduce its Human Reproductive Cloning and Trans-species Fertilisation Bill as the move ‘cuts across attempts to draft uniform commonwealth-state legislation’.
The October 29 letter to the nation’s governments is also signed by Catholic and other ethicists, senior legal figures, scientists, medical specialists and community leaders.
The letter focuses on the creation of embryos for their stem cells.
Such reproduction of human life results in ‘a laboratory embryo with no parents or guardians, in fact no one to protect his or her interests’, it says.
‘It means that all embryos would be likely to be destroyed, since the advocates of human cloning experiments acknowledge that to allow them to develop would be unsafe.
‘Cloning humans would also occasion a whole range of new ethical and social dilemmas because the process radically dissociates procreation from the loving union of a man and a woman, opens up new possibilities for designing our progeny, controlling their genetic destiny or exploiting them for the advantage of others.’
